Articles

Orthopedic skulls align the firmament where stripped of their Catullus each closed apartment exchanges moods for time, the individual sublime, and heeds no call to duty beyond rescension’s beauty. Accommodations high beneath a battered sky alight with floodlit filth partake of stellar stealth and freeze no Hermides to silences that please the mother Pere Couchon but steadily roll on to thrust accordions of tridents into dawns, covert from prying eyes, the little soul that dies. Sense cannot regulate the Platt or river Plate, industrious and dim, perched on the edgemost rim of pleas to abrogate the pity of sister Kate. Why should they so abscond, as if their progress were replete of all the monde, all others to aver? Consigned each to their time, the annals strict compile the manner of the house, the excellence of rhyme each sequel may defile according to his mouse, supportive of the pile of repetitious crime, then folded into dawn awake death to move on.

II

for Philip Horton

My capital is cultural capital. But we were young then. The sausages were plump, and the balconies ripe. Pressed into service, the elevators took us to silences without appeal; you loved one first, then the other. Tributes to Charleville and Douai pall on the cheap and bitter tongues of another generation, west to east. The wind has abscond with picnics. I look into the pelted sky and wonder if we did arrive, or if the march, the liberated city, sank seven wonders in its pity. I have no need to hear from friends. These ends, too meagre to recall, revive an aolanthus desperate for the spring to release joy in the defended city. Climb into bed, and feel the cold hands fall to sleep a negro witch burns, steady call and trumpet of headlights glimmering on the wall. Until winter I shall have no need to wake, but hibernate, these letters to partake of frozen sands, sands frozen, done with switching the kings of France; monsieur, je desole.

* * *

My war wounds are a solace to me now. May turns the fleur-de-lis, a change of valise that comes to Paris in the spring. I am the diplomat my fathers were before me. I carry no fake Bottom in my trousers, but by degrees stare down the eyes of mausers trained on the moon, the eyes of pyramids. The firefly in August turns and flits, the bowser sits, an aged woman shits into her coffee. I eat my toffee and read La Monde. I can’t recall how fond I may have been in youth. I am no hero. I am still betting that time will show me in my proper setting, long past these fevers, and these bouts of gout, that turn me inwards, when my secret’s out.

Paris Feb. 28 – March 2, 2014

Meditations

It isn’t really right No, it really isn’t fair To compress and circumnavigate the night To an image and a square As still and motionless As your just being there And the circles should protest That the light by which you’re dressed That the roundness of a sentence has expressed That oblivion should be put to the test Of other words used somewhere else As if the clock at midnight up and tells Of someone else Of something else And why behind its wings should the world hide The sense of something it has held inside And parting thus from all your memories Still find your image here though ill at ease Were there nothing to regret Were the midnight newly met And glowing grids stacked to eternity Were all you see This sense of someone else’s sense of things Dissipates and clings To the silence that the hour brings That’s what we do To make the hour new And certainly not what we expect But how then to inspect The ethereal architect Who clamours in the rose and gold Of things when we are neither young nor old Or to detect The character of midnight when it fold Into a map or set of chinese boxes That have no say In any increment of the world’s way So inconceivable it stands aloof From the patter of the rain upon the roof As idle as if one compelling truth Were all we prayed for Were all we stayed for Shall I pass this to your hand And receive the reprimand Of one who came for Of one who stayed for The silence of the latching of a door Or is there more These meditations shake me to the core.

* * *

And the winter is so cold The wind whips rain into a world that’s old And nothing stays Beyond the worry and the strain of days That end these ways Accommodate some postulated stranger To fortify the mind That’s left so much behind And yet you’ll find That what is left can be distilled and strained And left upon some lit but empty altar Not yet to falter But with resolve to seek and find I’ve nothing in my mind And cannot alter The necessary change that you will find Compels the world to which it is aligned Folded, sealed and stamped and duly signed By the serious exchequer Of which we both concur Merely to have passed the time Severely to have made a rhyme As savage as the midnight to a mime Goes in repose Out of all the gestures that he knows And fixing there A circle in the glowing of a square No, it really isn’t fair